• Ascend910@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    But actually what does Sudo do? Everyone using windows just default to running everything in administrator when something is not working as intended

    • 0x4E4F@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      8 months ago

      Sudo has an even higher authority than what an admin is in Windows. In Windows, you can’t (easily) run something as the highest authority there is, SYSTEM. In Linux, that is easily doable with sudo.

      So basically, the sudo in Windows is a joke, because it just runs things as admin… and that was already doable with runas in cmd, if you provide administrator credentials of course. The trouble is, with sudo in windows, another prompt shows up, which is basically the “give admin credentials” prompt (the UAC one as well, if you don’t have that one disabled). They could have at least coded it so that it doesn’t act like pkexec and ask you for credentials in a separate prompt, but ask you for creds in the same cmd window, which is what Linux does when you type in sudo (asks you for the root password, but doesn’t open a second prompt, as expected). They could have done that, but no, they decided to complicate things. Why? Beats me, have no idea.

      So, other than being not a true sudo as in POSIX OSes, it complicates things even more by adding at least one other prompt. They already had a prefectly good tool for that, runas. You just pass the creds in the same command and it runs the command with those creds, simple and elegant. But, they wanted to copy POSIX OSes and came up with a shitshow of prompts and the whole world laughing at their “sudo” which is nothing more than “run as admin”, which, as I said earlier, is nothing like what sudo is POSIX OSes.